Eat Your Heart Out, Barcelona October 31, 2026October 30, 2026 Actually, I love Barcelona. But as a proud New York taxpayer, I was pleased to see Oxford Economics rank us first among 1,000 global cities. I mean, Nice is nice (#276) and Modesto is modest (#275). But even Barcelona (#72) was left in our dust. It’s fun to see how the cities rank, and how Oxford weighs the five factors that go into its calculation. If you look “overall,” U.S. cities dominate. If you look just at “quality of life,” Canberra, Australia is first, Bergen, Norway, second, Singapore third — and New York barely makes it into the top 100. Mayor Mamdani — though a communist Muslim terrorist radical lunatic who wants to toss gays off rooftops, kill all the Jews, and institute sharia law, as some see him — wants to do something about that. He sent out this blast yesterday: Andrew — I want to talk to you about something New Yorkers deeply care about. Trash. Photo credit: Mohamed Hayibor Consider the humble trash bag. It leaks. It tears. Rats love to chew through it. It multiplies overnight until it covers the whole sidewalk. And it annoys the heck out of our hard-working sanitation workers who have to lift every single one by hand. For generations, our sidewalks have been plagued, and we’ve all learned to step around the pile and hold our breath on sweaty August days. A few years ago, the city finally tried something different. A pilot in West Harlem took every trash bag off the sidewalk and put it in a container with a lid. Revolutionary stuff! It worked. The streets got cleaner, and 311 complaints dropped. Then things stalled out. There wasn’t money to take the pilot citywide. No plans and no requirements to expand. So, my friends, I am proud to announce that black bags are in their twilight years. The era of the Empire Bin is upon us. By the end of the next year, six more community districts will be fully containerized, with at least one in every borough. By the end of 2031, the goal is that every district in the city will be. We put the money in the budget, and we put a date on it because a promise without a date is just wishcasting. You’ll see these soon in Crown Heights and Weeksville. Hunts Point and Fordham Heights. Sunnyside and Woodside. The West Village and SoHo. Staten Island’s North Shore. Empire Bins. Pretty cool name for a dumpster if you ask me. Each is assigned to a single building, and they open with a keycard. Rats don’t get key cards. The Empire Bins are emptied by automated trucks, the first of their kind in the U.S., so the fine folks at DSNY aren’t lifting every bag by hand. They say in politics there are always winners and losers, and I want to be honest: there are real losers here. They’re small. They’re organized. And they’ve been getting a free lunch in this city for a very long time. Of course we’re talking about our world famous NYC rats. Now, these guys didn’t endorse our first mayoral campaign. And I don’t expect them to endorse me for re-election. So I’ve made my peace with the fact that I’ve made a political enemy out of these tiny New Yorkers. Some people think trash is too small an issue for a mayor to be so vocal about. I disagree. This is part of our Pothole Politics: the belief that government should be measured by whether or not your daily life gets better. In the wealthiest city in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, no New Yorker should have to walk through garbage to get to work. For decades, we’ve been told “that’s just how New York is.” But we’ve always had a choice, and now we’re making a new one. When we’re done, our sidewalks will be clean. And New Yorkers will keep talking trash. We just won’t have to look at it. Zohran Mamdani Mayor of New York City → “Pothole Politics” — I like it. It almost makes you want to sing that line from Hamilton about immigrants. TRUMP MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY GROUP CORP. I wonder who paid $101.87 per share for DJT in 2022. Is he or she at all disillusioned now that each share isn’t worth quite enough to buy a gallon of diesel? Does it rankle that Trump — self-proclaimed king of debt and, arguably, king of bankruptcy — has, with his family, made billions off his presidency? Something on the order of $3 million a day since he pardoned all the January 6 rioters and handed Elon Musk a chain saw? Has that true believer at $101.87 a share begun to have doubts? Considered leaving MAGA? He or she is not alone. Vote! Swipe Blue! Know Your Rights When Going to the Polls! Oh — and Happy Halloween.